Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions provide tools and capabilities needed to create and maintain a clear picture of customers, from first contact through purchase and post-sales. For complex organizations, a CRM system may provide features and capabilities to help improve the way sales, marketing, and/or customer service organizations target new customers, manage marketing campaigns, and drive sales activities. CRM systems may include many components, hardware and software, utilized individually or in a shared manner by users internal or external to an organization.
CRM systems are an example of computing systems where data associated with entities such as persons, organizations, accounts, and similar ones are maintained for various purposes. Some of the information collected and maintained by CRM applications/instances of CRM applications may also be collected or consumed by other common applications such as email, contact, and/or scheduling (ECS) applications (for example, Outlook® by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.). Access to data and/or functionality of a CRM application/instance may be provided from within a user interface of an ECS application through an add-in module or similar arrangement, where specific controls may be provided as part of the ECS application user interface controls.
CRM applications/instances are typically organization-specific. In other words, configuration, setup, data, credentials, etc. for a user's access to a CRM application/instance for a particular organization may be different if the same user has access to a CRM application/instance for another organization. For example, a consultant may have access to the CRM systems of multiple companies. Even though all companies may use the same CRM application, the consultant would have to log in using different credentials and access different sets of data for each company. Thus, a user may have access to a CRM application/instance through the user interface of their ECS application, but would have to logout and login each time they want to navigate through the CRM data of a different organization, application, and/or instance of CRM application.